My daily readings 12/07/2010

Content curation and mapping service Pearltrees has decided to focus on the fact that people want to do things in groups and has as of today upgraded its core product with a groups functionality, called Pearltrees Team. Now accesible just by logging in, Pearltrees Team allows you to hook up with other people in order to create a Pearltree collaboratively in realtime.

If the team leader accepts, you then can see all the Pearltree curation happening as it happens as well as as comment on individual Pearltree decisions. You can also share your team curation easily via Facebook and Twitter.

In the same space as Storify and Pinterest, Pearltrees currently has 102,000 unique visits, 60,000 active users and 6 million pageviews monthly. Over 4 million pearls have been created thus far on topics as diverse as Windsurfing to Wikileaks.

Rubin: If you do a good job, what you’ve done is make it a reflex. Like a car, you learn how to drive and you can drive almost any car. You don’t get distracted by things. That’s the result of many, many years of evolution. That’s true of any consumer product. They become almost like second nature for you.

Kara: Oh good. She grabs it and pulls it close to her.

Now Rubin is showing the features, screen, etc. He’s talking about the Near Field Communications technology that is actually printed inside the back of the case. NFC allows a phone to scan specially printed tags.

Walt: Is that what sends all the information back to Google?

Rubin: Laughs. Goes back to demoing NFC and showing the Nexus S scanning a tag, which sends a URL for a video of the Nexus S to the phone, which then starts playing.

As for the bloatware found on so many phones, including the Nexus S’s forbear, the Galaxy S, Rubin said that consumers are voicing their opinions and voting with their wallets, which I think was his way of tacitly admitting that Carrier garbage is a bad decision and people will reject it one way or another. I suspect once there’s a really consumer-friendly root or just vanilla install available, people might start doing that to rid themselves of the dozen sponsored apps on their new phone.

Frankly, keeping up with growth has presented more work than our small team was prepared for — with traffic now climbing more than 500M pageviews each month. But we are determined and focused on bringing our infrastructure well ahead of capacity as quickly as possible. We’ve nearly quadrupled our engineering team this month alone, and continue to distribute and enhance our architecture to be more resilient to failures like today’s.

So the ability to both emulate a contactless smartcard and interrogate passive rfid devices. Pretty damn cool – the ability to open doors/start cars/unlock computers/pay for stuff just with your phone without resorting to bluetooth/wifi hacks or addon hardware. Also opens you up to lots of potential applications for extra information in the real world on things that otherwise don’t have barcodes.